Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

106 E. Hemelsoet
a very relevant factor for recognition of refugee status. But once people are categorised
into the group of ‘irregular migrants’, they are treated as a monolithic group
of people. Contextual elements slide to the background and become rather irrelevant.
The residence status is the qualifying benchmark to be included or excluded
from all kinds of (citizen) rights, provisions and initiatives. Everything depends on
the documents one has, or does not have.
As a consequence, the quest for these documents serves as the binding agent
for the people lumped together under the denominator ‘irregular migrants’. This
experience is shared by all of these people. They come across each other e.g. in
charity organisations or in shared waiting queues for public services. But at least
as important as this guiding similarity are the observed differences between irregular
migrants. Various cultural backgrounds, motivations to take refuge and personal
histories that lead to irregularity are often incomparable. An Eastern European girl
kidnapped and smuggled into Western Europe by human traffickers for prostitution
deals with problems that have little to do with those faced by her immigrant
worker compatriots who come here to work for a few months on the black market
so as to gather as much money as possible to send or take back to their homeland.
Similarly the unaccompanied child soldier has little in common with the African
soldier of fortune looking for a better life in the rich West, or the South-East-Asian
refugee seeking safety after suffering persecution in her homeland. Roma gypsies
often feel comfortable with their irregular status, and are often not even interested
in regularisation. ‘Being irregular’ in many cases seems to have become a part of
their cultural identity, to which they have adapted. Of course, within these different
groups of people there are large differences; homogenising them through stereotypes
is not what the preceding examples are intended to do. What I am trying to
emphasise here are the divergent perspectives and (previous and current) living conditions
of all these people (at a cultural or ethnic but at least as much at a personal
level). The government also recognises that incomparable situations refer to different
problems that are not necessarily related to residence status. Human trafficking,
war traumas of unaccompanied minors, moonlighting, clandestine (drugs) trade, etc.
are important problems that cannot be captured under the name of ‘irregular migration’.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what is being done when numbers of irregular
migrants are estimated. None of the studies mentioned above draw attention to these
differences. This leads to injustice for the people involved. They are (independent
of the particular term used to define irregular migrants) linked to problems that
may have nothing to do with their personal conditions. From a policy perspective, it
shows that treating these people as a monolithic group takes away the possibility of
making desirable distinctions. In statistical terms, this reflects the danger intrinsic
to reducing the complexity of a large amount of data to a limited number of differences.
Restricting the degrees of freedom to obtain more accurate data inevitably
has homogenising consequences. What is left are vague numbers that hardly contain
any relevant information. That brings us to the last section of this chapter, in
which explore alternative ways of dealing with the aforementioned problems are
explored.